Wednesday, 18 June

The “Heartbeat” of Leadership

Skip Prichard is a CEO, blogger and frequent speaker on topics ranging from leadership to personal development, growth and innovation strategies and organizational culture. As a self-professed “perpetual student” of leadership, Skip prescribes to the belief that even the best of leaders can improve their leadership acumen, each and every day. To that end, he has interviewed hundreds of leaders across many industries and walks of life, making these learnings available to all readers on his Leadership Insights blog (skipprichard.com).

In no setting is leadership more needed or more tested than in organizations that are undergoing game-changing technology and cultural shifts. IT leaders, whose teams are the critical “heartbeat” driving an organization forward, must successfully lead in an environment where the pace of change of technology is accelerating and the expectations of users are climbing at an even faster rate. In addition to guiding teams into unchartered territory, there is the expectation of flawless delivery, relentless speed and high user satisfaction.

How can the IT leader be most successful? Remarkable leaders ensure that their strategic and team vision includes both “heart” and “mind” leadership – a clear purpose combined with pragmatic execution and speed. They understand that culture trumps strategy; keeping an unwavering focus on what really matters while ensuring a high-performance culture for sustainable success. This approach requires perspective, perseverance, and most importantly, passion.

In his remarks, Skip will share examples of how organizations have improved their impact following this approach. Guests will leave with practical thoughts for putting these leadership principles into action today, further strengthening the heartbeat of both the team and organization.

Salary Review Report (CIO's)

Gene Spencer of Gene Spencer Consulting will discuss the results and take questions on the 2013 CLAC salary survey.

The Diffusion of Smartphones and Tablets in Liberal Arts Universities

This presentation will discuss the findings from a 2013 survey at a small, private, liberal arts university, comparing faculty and student perceptions and usage of smartphones and tablets for academic purposes. Strategies for increasing the adoption of these devices will be presented.

Measure Twice, Ask Once

Given the financial and accountability pressures facing our institutions, our Cabinets and Boards are more and more asking us for data that measures IT efficiency and effectiveness.

Come listen to a few possibilities and come share your own ideas. Together, maybe we can sketch a plan that meets the needs of our institutional leaders.

Beyond GAE - the + Apps

How do our colleges handle curricular and administrative use of the Google commercial applications that fall outside the standard Google Apps for Education Agreement? What are the concerns and interests that guide our decision-making around opening up these applications within our college Google domains? Come together to hear a panel of CLAC peers share their college's approach.

The Liberal Arts Voice in Shaping Online Learning

In an era of MOOCs, SPOCs, blended learning, and the flipped classroom, liberal arts institutions have started to explore these different modes of teaching and learning. Along with brief descriptions of local initiatives, participants will examine how and why their schools are working to shape the future of these various modes of teaching and learning. Participants and audience members will discuss the importance of our institutions as having a voice in shaping the future of education while preserving the core values of the liberal arts student experience. Close relationships between instructor and student are of paramount importance to a highly successful learning process, so how can those relationships be cultivated through online learning? With the changing academic landscape, liberal arts schools have an opportunity to transform learning for students on campus and to demonstrate their value to a broader audience.

Information Services as Team Builders and Project Managers in the Liberal Arts

Recent years have seen the rapid maturing of cloud technologies and a marked increase in savvy among technology consumers at all levels. In higher education in particular, this has led to a proliferation of best-of-breed software systems that fit various niche needs, sometimes resulting in multiple application deployments even within one department. While the technical details of spinning up new systems are usually fairly straightforward, managing the inherent cultural shifts and resultant data explosion can be much more challenging. Individual departments are typically not well-versed in project management, and many liberal arts institutions do not employ dedicated project management professionals. Fortunately, IT is often well-positioned to step into this role by virtue of our experiences with administering various systems projects.

Over the past year, Information Services at DePauw has worked closely with our office of Development and Alumni Engagement, assuming a leadership role for multiple major implementation and conversion initiatives. Along the way, we found that several of the simple tools and techniques we employ for software development and systems deployment can be leveraged to help guide broader projects that entail significant cultural components. The result has been a more comprehensive understanding of the systems in play by administrative staff and a very strong relationship between IS and Development Services. We are eager to share what we have learned during this process, both good and bad, and how we plan to improve our model moving forward.

Networked Collaboration: the Demands of Digital Scholarship

As faculty increasingly explore digital scholarship, the technical and technological demands of their projects will expand. My grant-funded, consortial position locates me in the libraries of The Ohio Five, but it is clear that no one support structure will be able to accommodate the convoluted needs of faculty. In addition to server space and subdomains, support both technical and technological, they will also need collaborators for database construction, interface design, and data visualization (e.g.). Such services--though I hesitate to use that term--certainly exist on liberal arts campuses, but those who are qualified to deploy them don't always have the luxury of exploring intellectual curiosities outside of their job descriptions.

An answer in higher ed has been outsourcing. Relying on industry works fine while the flow of these projects is at a trickle and while there is grant money to support them. As demand for grant funds increases, however, liberal arts faculty will be at a marked disadvantage to those at research institutions not least because of the time required of a grant application. Are there ways in which we might, instead, support these kinds of advanced, digital, scholarly projects in-house?

I hope to spark conversation about the utility of local or consortial programming and design for faculty projects. What might a more circumscribed, systemic collaboration between technicians, technologists, and subject specialists look like? Is it truly necessary? Does it involve the creation of new positions that live in the spaces where these three areas overlap?

This is the Brain on iPads

A pilot project assigned iPads to students enrolled in Physiological Psychology. The students had the iPads for the duration of the semester. Students used various apps, including 3DBrain and NeuroKnowledge, and websites, e.g., www.biopsychology.com. The apps demonstrated concepts and improved understanding of neuroanatomy, electrical activity of the brain and neurological diseases. Data from tests, papers and overall performance was compared between the iPad students and earlier semesters of the same class taught without iPads. Another goal was to offset technology cost by using the apps and online resources instead of a traditional textbook.

Building an Integrated Asset System

Follow the trials, tribulations, successes and failures of Reed College's development and adoption of a new open-source, integrated asset management system. The presentation will cover preliminary research; selection of a vendor; design, customization and testing; and finally the rollout of v.1 of the product. All in 10 minutes.

Are Tech Trends Driving Better Education?

There's been a lot of debate about technology's influence on education—over the merits of online learning, open learning, and massive classes, etc.. The increasing ubiquity of mobile and wearable devices is pressuring teachers to reconsider their place in the classroom. Perhaps what might be overlooked in all this controversy is the rising emphasis on active and participatory teaching methods, plus peer-to-peer learning. Online resources and always connected mobile devices present tremendous opportunities for communication and collaboration. The expanding availability of good, quality multi-media content reinforces the importance of multi-modal reinforcement. Are current technology trends perhaps converging toward a pinnacle of educational excellence?

Thursday, 19 June

Technology and the Internationalization of Higher Education

In this talk, Dr. Weinberg will pull from two sets of disperse experiences to outline a new set of questions as it relates to technology and higher education. For 8 years, Dr. Weinberg helped lead World Learning, a global organization focused on educating young people from 140 countries to address critical global issues. In July 2013, Dr. Weinberg become the President of Denison University. From these experiences, Dr. Weinberg has become interested in how higher education can prepare a rising generation to address a myriad of critical global issues from climate change to social violence by equipping them with the capacity to thrive in diverse environments, embrace rapid change, and think entrepreneurially. He believes doing this requires internationalizing our campuses in ways that makes technology central. Dr. Weinberg will argue the answers are easy, but we need to get the questions right. He will reflect on his first year at Denison to lay out a series of questions that would shift how we define internationalization, the role of technology on our campuses, and the educational strategies that are driving higher education.use lessons learned, mistakes/successes, and share other templates and documents used to help articulate the process to the campus community.

IT Governance in Times of Change

In this presentation, I will review the evolution of the Lafayette College IT Governance and project prioritization process. This process was built as part of our IT master plan as well as a restructuring of the college's IT division. In addition, I will discuss lessons learned, mistakes/successes, and share other templates and documents used to help articulate the process to the campus community.

Other Duties as Assigned: Redux

At CLAC 2013, we asked and answered the question:

What do you get when you have an ambitious and design-savvy president who finds an alumni donor interested in highlighting the institution’s commitment to Global Affairs? For CLAC 2014, we'll update the community on lessons learned from the renovation of Johnson Hall, highlight new technologies from its Varelas Innovation Lab, and demonstrate the Global Crossroads System, an entirely new pedagogical tool, developed in collaboration with Second Story. Seehttp://www.secondstory.com/project/browse/client/oxy/global-crossroads.

The Decorah Metronet: How Collaboration leads to cheaper Internet Service and Other Collaborative Opportunities

Luther College along with 5 other non-profit entities in Decorah, IA have partnered to build a fiber optic network connecting 18 locations. The network provides different benefits to the individual entities, as well as enables collaborative opportunities. Our first collaboration aggregates our buying power to purchase shared Internet service. This investment is helping us save money while increasing our bandwidth standard to meet the growing demands of our faculty, staff and students. A second opportunity targets improved business continuity.

“Framing” Leadership in IT/Library Collaborations

During this session you will think through how to lead collaborations between IT and Libraries using Lee Bolman and Terrence Deal’s four frames. It will combine a short introduction to the concepts with interactive group work and discussion. After an introduction to the four frames, participants will take a self-evaluation of their leadership orientations then apply these frames to a common challenge that crosses IT and library organizations. Small discussion groups will examine a rich scenario, focused on a problem involving Library/IT collaborations. Each group will discuss the scenario from the perspective of one of the frames. The session will culminate in a group discussion of the challenges as viewed through all four frames of leadership.

The Sky is the Limit: Google+ Hangout as an Interactive Teaching & Learning Tool

Web-conferencing platforms such as Adobe Connect, Blackboard Collaborate, and Global Meet have been more or less successfully employed as a pedagogical and collaborative tool for enhancing language learning in a national and international context, in brick and mortar, distant-learning, and hybrid environments. Since the launch of the Google+ Hangout platform with its multifunctional tools for interaction (screen sharing, chatting, whiteboards, presentation software, etc.) online hybrid learning has become uniquely easy, inexpensive, intuitive, inviting and “human” for both students and teachers. This tool can be used to connect students in small study groups, prepare presentations, have discussions, keep students connected over breaks and while on study-abroad, and to connect students with instructors for office hours, homework help, discussion follow-ups, to bridge time away from the classroom, and for tutors to offer group and discussion sessions. The sky is the limit, quite literally, with a growing number of these cloud-based applications.

Make you Department Responsive, Agile and Flexible by Empowering a Student Workforce

Identify the key components to a successful student workforce that will enable an IT department to accomplish more while maintaining high levels of provided service and satisfaction for end users. Review and discuss how Hamilton uses recruitment, training and job references to empower students for their department and institution.

Water, Electricity...Data Network

As campus networks at Liberal Arts colleges have become a utility service that is paramount to the operation of the institution (like running water and electricity), perhaps our IT departments should shift the operation and maintenance to external entities. Is this a good idea? What are the pros/cons of doing this? Southwestern is considering this, and Alma looked very closely at doing so recently. This panel will engage the audience about the future of "owning/operating" our own networks at schools like ours vs. outsourcing them to external entities. We intend this to be a panel-led group discussion among the audience and panelists where we can fully probe this idea and its complexities.

During our Mindshare, we brought together ImageNow administrators from DePauw, Kalamazoo, Luther College, the College of Wooster, and Trinity College for a workshop focused on building workflows. Our expert helped the rest of us gain a better understanding of how workflows function in ImageNow, leading to the development of functional flows during the three day in-person sessions. This presentation will focus on both the proposal/collaboration process as well as some of the more technical aspects of the project.